Is the West sanctioning Russia or Germany?
- Saving Ukraine may have exorcised the ghosts of Munich but Putin is not Hitler; it may be inadvertently creating Weimar 2.0
If politics were chess, would you sacrifice a rook for a pawn? It’s not inconceivable. Moving towards the end game, a pawn may be in a position to threaten your opponent’s king. But if it soon becomes apparent that it’s not happening, would you still give up your rook?
More political analysts are asking why Washington continues to risk the political and social stability of Germany, the linchpin of European peace and prosperity, for Ukraine. For a short time, it might have looked to the Americans that the war offered an opportunity to wreck the Russian economy, get rid of Vladimir Putin and his cronies, and discipline the unruly Europeans.
In other words, they were aiming to do “another Ukraine” – as in getting rid of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 and installing a pro-Western regime – but this time, the coup would be in Moscow itself. Of course, the 2014 coup, often dressed up as a popular revolution, was partly what provoked not one but two invasions from Russia in the first place.
It looks like the United States has disciplined the Europeans all too well, but achieved little else. If it couldn’t get rid of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, it’s even less likely it could send off Putin. The much-touted Ukrainian offensive has gone nowhere; it’s fair to conclude it has basically failed.
The Russian leader this week stood smiling and shaking hands with President Xi Jinping; their two countries have never been closer. Autocrats stick together, you say? Not necessarily. Given a choice, I am sure Xi would much prefer smiling and shaking hands with an American president. But Washington didn’t leave him with much of a choice.
Well, there goes much of the Eurasian land mass for Washington, which now also risks destabilising western Europe – for a lost cause called Ukraine.
That is an interesting conundrum that German historian Tarik Cyril Amar raised in a recent article in Newsweek magazine, in a piece titled, “The West’s Real Problem Isn’t Going to Be Russia, or China, but Germany”.
For going along with Washington and Nato beyond the call of duty by seeking total victory for Ukraine, the current German leadership is weakening their country’s economy, fracturing its long post-war stable and peaceful domestic politics and giving rise to extremism.
“We have assumed that the first country to buckle under the economic strain of the war over Ukraine would be Russia,” Amar wrote.
“Yet we are now seeing that the sanctions weapon has largely failed. Russia’s economy is resilient and growing. But what if it is Germany that stumbles first?
“Germans stressed about their economy, distrusting their elites as favouring foreign interests, and disenchanted with centrist values and methods – a picture too familiar for comfort.”
Weimar, anyone?
As Amar has observed, Berlin has been pathologically uninterested in who might be behind the sabotage of its Nord Stream pipelines, a key strategic infrastructure whose destruction would have been a cause for war for most countries under most circumstances.
American intelligence claimed rogue elements within the Ukrainian military might have done it. Investigative reporters such as Seymour Hersh claimed the hit was ordered directly by the White House.
If the US did it, would Nato countries, under their collective defence pledge, have to declare war on their own big boss? If the Ukrainians did it, would Nato have to join Russia to take out Kyiv?
No wonder the Germans, or any European government, didn’t want to look into it too deeply. But how might ordinary German voters look at it; might they now conclude that their leaders really are sacrificing their own national interests to foreign ones?
As for the economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, most major economies will see some growth this year, but not Germany. The projected shrinkage of 0.1 per cent in Germany for 2023 by the IMF in April worsened to 0.3 per cent in July. The explanation offered by the IMF was simple, if politically incorrect.
Germany is an export nation. So it has been hit badly by generally weak global trade. But more specifically, it has chosen to de-risk/decouple, as a matter of policy, from its biggest trading partner, China.
Meanwhile, it has long relied on energy from Russia. Now it has cut itself off; well, not entirely. It continues to buy gas from Russia, and oil from India and some Arab suppliers which buy it cheap from Russia and resell it at much higher prices to Germany. Makes perfect sense, no?
As Amar wrote, “Modern Germany is built on a simple principle: import raw materials and energy, add labour and technology, and sell the results. Remove competitively priced energy from the mix, and the model collapses.”
Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, has gone out of her way to give China the middle finger at every opportunity. Few Western leaders have been more gung-ho in going after Putin than Baerbock. Her partner-in-crime Robert Habeck, who is the minister of the economy and climate change, presides over “the energy transition” from Russia. Both are of the Greens – what do you know, once the grouping of the peaceniks!
No wonder the centre left and the centre right – the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens – are all losing electoral support. In their place, you see the rise of the far left and the far-right, The fast-rising Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) is so far out on the right some within the federal government are even thinking about banning it using a constitutional anti-fascist provision.
Sahra Wagenknecht, the darling of the far left, whom some consider real chancellor material, is threatening to form her own leftist party. Once a communist and perhaps still is one, she reportedly read all of Karl Marx’s books. That immediately piqued my interest.
Interestingly, she has been compared, not kindly, to Rosa Luxemburg, the tragic Marxist whose murder marked the start of the Weimar period.
AfD is led by Alice Weidel, who is as photogenic and charismatic as Wagenknecht. Given the current crop of leaders like Baerbock and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, if I were a German voter, I would go for Weidel or Wagenknecht in a heartbeat, just like American voters who chose Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Economic decline, political fragmentation, the rise of extremist political parties – it does sound alarmingly familiar! Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Germany today will produce as many artistic, literary and scientific geniuses as Weimar did once.
“The existing trajectory of US policy risks sacrificing western Europe for the sake of Ukraine, and US policymakers need to wake up to this risk,” wrote Anatol Lieven, a director of the Eurasia programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“If this were to happen, it would be one of the worst bargains in the entire history of US strategy. There is a tendency now for Americans to congratulate themselves on the submission of Europe to American strategy as a result of the war in Ukraine. This underestimates the threat to Europe and of US interests there.
“The threat, as described, is overwhelmingly an internal one, resulting from a deadly cocktail of economic stagnation, uncontrolled migration, and political extremism, worsened by the war in Ukraine. If present patterns continue, the result will be to cripple Europe both economically and politically.”
People think the West is sanctioning Russia. Perhaps it’s really sanctioning itself, and Germany specifically. Saving Ukraine by defeating Putin – which now seems increasingly futile – may be saying no to “Munich”, as US hawks like to shout out, but inadvertently creating Weimar 2.0.
